DEBORAH ABBOTT WAS SOMEWHAT HAPPILY MARRIED to a nice man with whom
she'd created two adorable sons before she realized that the
intense rapport with her best friend, Rachel, was the first step toward
love and "unbelievably thrilling" sex with women. After
separating from her husband, she'd often laugh at her dueling
identities. "I would be at the PTA meeting and people would assume
that I was heterosexual," says Abbott. "And then I'd be
dancing at a club and people would be shocked to learn I had an
ex-husband and kids!"

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

ABBOTT CAN GIGGLE NOW, but when she began looking for resources for
"married lesbians" back in the early 1980s, she found nothing
and felt lonely. So she started her own support group in Santa Cruz,
Calif., called From Wedded Wife to Lesbian Life, which would also become
the name of her 1995 book published by Crossing Press. "I have
women who've come for years," says Abbott, currently the
director of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Resource Center
at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "We are a
community." And the newbies? "They look around the room and
weep with relief," she adds. "They say, 'Everyone looks
so normal!'"

Abbott's group sees about 100 women a year who pretty much
thought they were straight through years of marriage and child rearing,
only to have a change of heart later in life. Call them LAMs--or
lesbians after marriage: These are the women who have tied the knot,
procreated, and, once the children are out of the home or more
independent, found love in the arms of a woman.

The first morn of my acquaintance to go on the LAM was my high
school voice teacher, a fascinating and dramatic lady with three
daughters and a husband who had taught me to sing "Macavity"
at the top of my lungs. I admit I was shocked when I heard the rumor
that she had left town and was involved with a lady musician. Then my
college roommate told me that her mother (two kids, 20 years of
heterosexual marriage) was getting hitched in Hawaii to a woman. More
recently, my good friend's 60-year-old mother phoned her to report
she is in the midst of a white-hot lesbian affair, having never
mentioned or acted on any sapphic attraction before in her life.
Conversations and similar tallies with other friends confirmed the
trend: LAMs are the new LUGs (lesbians until graduation).

LAM sounds like a joke, especially given the derision directed at
LUGs--the phenomenon of young women who never thought they were gay yet
find themselves madly in love with a girl, usually while at college. In
part because of their youth (and in part because of misogyny), it's
assumed that these young women's actions are contrived, designed
merely to better attract a Girls Gone Wild--consuming heterosexual male.
LUGs are common and yet tragically misunderstood. According to writer
(and LUG) Laura Eldridge, 29, coauthor of The No-nonsense Guide to
Menopause, people usually identify college as the time when biology
yields to social and cultural pressure, but it is probably more true
that it's the other way around. "The perception is that the
college campus environment encourages straight girls to engage in
lesbian behavior in the same way it might lead you to be an ardent
communist for a couple years or get an ill-advised tattoo," says
Eldridge. "Then, the belief goes, you stop all these games, admit
who you truly are, and find a man."

That's backward, says Eldridge. In fact, "social
pressures on women to marry and have children really start to kick in
during your 20s." So in your coed days you're free to fall for
women if you have the inclination; as you get closer to the childbearing
end date, that social freedom constricts. Eldridge thinks that many
bisexual women start to focus on dating men "not because they were
pretending same-sex desire before but because they are giving in to
intense social expectations now."

CHANGING DESIRES

A growing body of research on women's sexuality indicates that
Eldridge may be right. "LUGs have always existed in some form, but
the difference is context," says Lisa Diamond, a psychology
professor at the University of Utah and the author of a forthcoming book
from Harvard University Press called Sexual Fluidity: Understanding
Women's Love and Desire. "College is the first time a lot of
women have been given the space to even ask themselves the questions Who
do I desire? or What do I want?" This is different from 20 or 30
years ago, says Diamond, when college served as a backdrop in the mad
rush to find a husband. Everyone from "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" author Adrienne Rich to novelist Alix Kates
Shulman has attested that back then everything was about getting a man
to the altar. Going to college, working--it all led inexorably to
wifedom. Perhaps just as many women were attracted to both men and women
in those days, but they tended "to be married already," says
Diamond, and didn't know how to act on this fluidity.

Nor did they have the time. "When one's children are
young, finding the ideal companion is not your first priority,"
says therapist, writer, and former LAM Amy Bloom. "You're just
trying to keep up with your responsibilities." Women didn't
ask themselves, What do I want? until they had a few kids, glimpsed
their first copy of Ms. magazine, and realized there might be more to
life after all.

There's more than just social pressures acting on our libidos;
there's the call of the wild, the evolutionary compulsion to
procreate. "I do remember kind of a biological grrr--a craving for
intercourse--that really picked up with some serious speed at age
28," says Anastasia Higginbotham, a Brooklyn-based writer who
primarily had girlfriends from age 20 to 29, one of whom was me (age 23
to 25, in case you're wondering). "My fantasies
shifted--that's where I really noticed it. All of my sexual
fantasies suddenly involved penetration or men, and they had never,
never been that way before." Higginbotham also recalls that her
ovulation cycles were stronger, and "when I was ovulating it was
like I was in heat, so it was hard to be in a relationship with my
girlfriend, who was so not going through the same thing."

Perhaps it's no coincidence that women choose women when they
are most decidedly trying not to get pregnant-teens, early 20s, after
having a few kids-and men when they are most in touch with their
biological clock. Consider these well-documented same-sex
"defections" among younger women: Rebecca Walker (who recently
broke up with longtime girlfriend Meshell Ndegeocello and had a baby
with a man), Ani DiFranco (who married a man in her late 20s and
recently had a baby with her current boyfriend), and the inimitable Anne
Heche, who left Ellen DeGeneres and married cameraman Coley Laffoon not
a year after their breakup. Baby Homer came one year after that. Of
course, in Heche's case, the divorce came not long after the baby.
But so it goes with many LAMs.

DISCARDED LABELS

The stories in From Wedded Wife to Lesbian Life speak not just to a
newfound and profound desire for women but to the resentment that
unequal gender status breeds, particularly after marriage. Witness this
dispatch from Robin Finley, who lived harmoniously with a man for four
years and then made the mistake of marrying him: "Before [the
marriage] we had the utmost idealism about our relationship and
discussed every little decision in detail," she writes. "With
marriage, assumptions became the rule, and blatant sexism reared its
head: If I worked late, I was a workaholic. If he worked late, he was
just meeting the demands of his job." In the same book, well-known
activist JoAnn Loulan, who wrote the books Lesbian Sex, The Lesbian
Erotic Dance, and Lesbian Passion, was asked to compare lesbian
"marriage" to heterosexual marriage. "As a lesbian I
don't feel any concerns about the power differential whatsoever. I
absolutely hold my own, power-wise," Loulan wrote.
"There's this freedom in lesbianism in that I'm not seen
as a role. I am not a wife. So, therefore, I don't have to 'do
anything.' I don't have to cook. I don't have to clean. I
don't have to be the one to take care of the kids."

But caretaking that's oppressive when one-sided can be utterly
gratifying when it's returned and free-flowing, as it often is
among women. Brooklyn-based writer and teacher Sara Jane Stoner (once
bisexual, now full-on "queer"), 28, has watched her gorgeous
"trophy wife" mother ("she's budget-trophy-she shops
at TJ Maxx") nurse four of her friends through cancer, one of whom
died. "While the husbands in these situations begin to
travel--constantly," says Stoner, "my mother is there
vacuuming up her friends' dead skin cells after chemo. She does the
care." Stoner admits to having fantasies of her mom going on the
LAM.

While a desperate housewife who gets her emotional needs met by her
lady friends isn't quite a lesbian, she might be one down the road,
given the sexual flexibility that is increasingly viewed as the norm for
women. A LAM, just like a five-star lesbian, might find herself
attracted to men if in the right situation. "There is now a lot of
good, nationally representative data indicating that a majority of women
who are attracted to women are also attracted to men," says
Diamond, who for the past 11 years has conducted her own ongoing study
of sexual-minority women. "Many of the die-hard lesbians in my
study found that they were attracted to men if they were in a position
around lots of men." For instance, one longtime lesbian Diamond
interviewed became very close friends with a male student at graduate
school and finally fell in love with him and even got married. She
believed she was still exclusively attracted to women, except for her
husband, but avoided giving her sexuality any labels, saying, "I
feel like I'm a lesbian who happened to fall in love with this one
guy, and people don't accept that."

Because she's married, people just assume she's an
average heterosexual, says Diamond, "so she makes a point of
telling folks that she's bisexual. She realizes that saying
'lesbian who's with a man' will not really fly, so she
settles for 'bisexual' so that they won't assume
she's heterosexual." Diamond cites this example as evidence
that women's sexual fluidity is not based primarily on avoiding the
stigma of being gay. "It's the opposite: Now that she's
with a man, she makes efforts not to just slip into 'heterosexual
privilege,'" says Diamond, "and in fact to
'spoil' that privilege by informing people that although
she's married, she's not straight."

LAMs tend not to identify as bisexual but to see their current
state as permanent, though many eventually re-partner with men. LAMs Amy
Bloom and JoAnn Loulan are now with men; older lesbians such as Alice
Walker, Jan Clausen (who wrote the memoir Apples and Oranges about this
transition), and women's music star Holly Near are in love
relationships with men. "We talk a lot about not worrying about
labels," says Abbott of the philosophy in her support group.
"I say, Focus on how are you feeling right now, what draws you
right now." In other words, ask the radical question: What do you
want?

ILLUSTRATED BY MICHELLE THOMPSON EXCLUSIVELY FOR THE ADVOCATE

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